The Man Who Was Shot

By Marià Vayreda

From the mountainous hinterlands of Catalonia comes the harrowing tale of a veteran of the Carlist Wars who survives his own execution by firing squad. When he returns from his journey to the hereafter, he is a changed man, known to all of his acquaintances as L'Afusellat--the man who was shot.

Translated from Catalan by Juan LePuen
Genre: short story
Length: 12,000 words
Date of English translation: 2012

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fario
• Release date: May 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476364094

Marià Vayreda

Marià Vayreda (1853-1903), Catalan writer from a family of rural nobles. Veteran of the Third Carlist War. Brief exile in France after the defeat of the Carlists. _La punyalada_ is his best-known work.

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Marià Vayreda

The Man Who Was Shot

Translated by Juan LePuen

Original title: L’Afusellat

Translated from Catalan by Juan LePuen

Published at Smashwords by Fario

English translation copyright 2012 by Fario

Contents

The Man Who Was Shot

Notes

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The Man Who Was Shot

Anyone who has ever made the trip from Olot to Vic via Collsacabra can say he knows the classic journey made by our forbears. Today, in the last third of the nineteenth century, the century of progress, steam, and electricity; today, where in a lot of countries locomotives are insulted for going at a snail’s pace and people are trying to have electricity take the place of steam and air routes the place of railroads, as if it weren’t enough for man to have scratched at and moved the highest mountains in all directions, he should want to make his triumph more obvious by going over them and spitting on their faces; today, then, if any of my readers, on a passing fancy, wants to know the degree to which the travel stories he will have read with such pleasure in the works of Cervantes, Lesage,[1] Espinel,[2] and so many other writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are true, let him come to Olot, hire the traditional mule and guide, and set out at the break of day on the Grau road.

And I mention this not because I believe that there are no other areas in Catalonia that still conserve their color of two centuries ago but because I doubt there is another day’s journey more picturesque, more varied, or more replete with the details than the one mentioned. From the fertile and well cultivated plains of Bas and Les Preses to the arid and bare terrain of L’Esquirol i Roda, from the strange and labyrinthine Bodatosca, with its vine arbors spreading over walls of basalt and clay, to the wild Collsacabra, with its thick beech and oak forests—you have everything there. Views as far as the eye can see, dizzying cliffs, hovels radiating destitution, manor houses of solid walls blackened by the years, not to mention, every so often, the classic roadside inn, the carter’s true milestone, some better stocked than others, some grubbier than others, but always full of color, and some of them full of memories of our wars both civil and national.

In the right frame of mind, the romantic traveler impressed by the writers we mentioned can easily reconstruct in his imagination many of the scenes from those books as he comes across the postman, with his crumpled and sweaty mailbag slung over his shoulders, or the courier from Olot, with his train of mules bedecked with small bells, and if he looks like a rich man he can even indulge in making himself the hero of some episode that calls to mind the days of Serrallonga[3] or Becaina,[4] although it should be said that the latter bit is becoming more unusual by the day.

Half by necessity and half on a whim, I set out on the road one fine July morning not too many years ago. Mounted, of course, on a hired mule, I was going out through what we call the Portal de Pavia when there’s a sign—which there isn’t always—just as it was getting light and the bats were taking their last turns before retiring. In the lead, the indispensable packer, setting the pace, with his hands in his pockets and his switch stuck in the